Mindfulness as a Foundation for Healing
You can think of mindfulness practice as an advanced operating system for navigating the ‘daydream’ we call our reality. It is also a vehicle to awaken from this daydream.
To awaken from the daydream is to become more aware of the present moment and to let go of the distractions and patterns that prevent us from experiencing life fully. It is to become more mindful and present in our daily lives, rather than simply going through the motions without really paying attention to what we are doing or experiencing.
When we can tune into our bodies wants and needs, we can start making better decisions for ourselves.
Jon Kabat Zinn defines mindfulness as “becoming friends with yourself.” The path of self healing begins by building a relationship with ourselves while a mindfulness practice reminds us of who we really are.
Meditation as a Tool to Achieve Mindfulness
On the surface, there are many reasons to meditate: Meditation promises clarity, focus, and even a keen level of awareness to the subtle pleasures of life. It’s also natural for our reasons to be more goal-oriented since greater concentration and balance can help us perform better at work, in sports, and creatively. The drive for success and achievement demands optimal human performance, and while mindfulness practice does increase performance, it also can alter our definition of success and happiness in the first place.
Meditation is a foundation-layer for any skill-building endeavor in that it first and foremost acts as a tool to connect with the true nature of ourselves and our potential.
Beginning to Let go
I imagine the first humans to be so primal and connected with their environments that a “hyper-present state” of reality was the status quo: All information being exchanged by intuition and full-bodied sense perception— allowing the mind to be much more instinctually and fully aware of the present moment.
Nowadays, there is so much to distract our attention from the present-moment and even our physical reality for that matter. Technology has introduced many different simulations to busy ourselves with and while some of these advancements have made our lives better and more connected, they also have become ways to distract ourselves from our emotional and spiritual intelligence.
As humans, we all have an innate capacity to reach this level of hyper-presence to cultivate psychic development, self-realization, and genuine compassion. However, we tend to fixate on stubborn patterns and impulses that either avoid pain or cling to pleasure. When we start noticing these unfulfilling thought patterns and reactive behaviors, we tend to seek out a remedy to dislodge the pesky existential splinter of ‘dukkha’ that steadily throbs in our subtle body.
Dukkha is a Buddhist term that refers to the unsatisfactory nature of things. It is often translated as "suffering," but it encompasses a broader range of experiences, including pain, frustration, dissatisfaction, and impermanence.
Most remedies are merely band-aids that cover up the discomfort only temporarily. In order to truly let go of our suffering, it must be eradicated at the root. This where mindfulness comes in: As we learn to treat our experience with gentleness, and see into the impermanent nature of our feelings, we can begin to ease our reactive tendencies and just be with our experience. As we witness our experience for what it is, we soon come to understand we are not the pain, the sadness, the anger, the discomfort or even the pleasure, but yet we’ve become accustomed to reacting to it.
Mindfulness gives us another choice — to be with our experience with gentleness and begin to let go.
Standing Face-to-Face with Ourselves
Our subconscious instincts are always communicating with us. When we ignore them, we bypass our needs and clog up our energy channels.
Emotional bypassing is when an individual avoids or suppresses their emotions, rather than dealing with them in a healthy way. This can lead to unresolved emotions and can cause problems in personal relationships and overall well-being.
Mindfulness is learning to be with our emotions in a gentle and loving way. This is how we start becoming our own best friend and tending to our needs in the most skillful way we can in the moment.
A traditional meditation practice offers a way to develop your ability to live more mindfully while cultivating awareness and equanimity:
Think of meditation as a bird. One wing is awareness and the other is equanimity. A bird cannot fly with just one wing. It needs both wings to function in harmony in order to soar through the air.
Awareness refers to being observant of the different thoughts, emotions, sensations, and experiences that come through our senses.
Equanimity refers to being with these experiences without reacting to them. In this way, we can be fully present with life and allow the coming-and-going of emotions to happen without multiplying our attachments to specific sensations, feelings, or thoughts.
If stillness and equanimity seem like a far stretch from where you are now— it isn’t. Meditation works by gradually developing these skills over time through consistent practice. Even 5 minutes a day will start a strong momentum you can build on.
Being aware of just one breath is the beginning of living a more mindful life.
When you makes peace with truth, you become free.
As Alyssa Scarano, LPC, describes it:
“WHEN I THINK OF MAKING PEACE WITH THE TRUTH, I THINK OF FACING MY FEELINGS, ALLOWING THEM TO SURFACE RATHER THAN PUSHING THEM AWAY OR TRYING TO CHANGE HOW I FEEL, SO THAT I CAN GAIN A SENSE OF CONTROL OVER MY EXPERIENCE— I GET TO CHOOSE WHAT I WANT TO ATTACH TO AND WHAT I WANT TO LET GO OF. MY ATTACHMENTS NO LONGER HAVE CONTROL OVER ME— THATS FREEDOM.”
The Power of Direct Experience
“Take no head above your own”
-Buddha
In other words, don’t take anyone else’s word for it— not your teacher, parent, friend, or famous person. Your Interpretation is most important. Your experience is unique and developing trust in yourself will take you further down the path then just taking another person’s word for it.
Meditation works because of the element of direct experience. Not because you read about it in a book or because google or AI said it’s true, but because you experienced it to be true yourself.
Here’s my favorite example:
Say, you’ve heard that the new Italian restaurant has the most delicious stuffed artichoke. You may have heard this rumor, but you still can’t necessarily vouch for it, nor are you able to fully understand the qualities that make it the best artichoke, because you haven’t tasted or experienced it yet.
You get to the restaurant and the waiter is escorting you to your table and as you walk through the restaurant you see others enjoying the artichoke. Licking their lips and exclaiming, “What a delicious artichoke! This is the best artichoke I’ve ever had!”
It must be. But you’re still not in the “in-club.” You can’t say with the same clarity and conviction the artichoke is the best. You’ve heard it was the best, you’ve witnessed others enjoying it as if it is the best, but you only have second-hand knowledge to confirm the truth. As of now, its still someone else’s truth and not your own.
Finally, you order the artichoke. It comes to your table and you take the first bite. Ah, now you understand— You’ve tasted its splendor and some deep knowing inside sparks with realization that it’s the best artichoke ever.
Now you too can tell others about it. They can take your word for it, but you wouldn’t even want them to— you know they can only know for sure once they taste it.
A New Found Trust
Meditation requires much more commitment than just tasting something. While it is very possible to experience deep insights the first time you sit, or in any individual session, it is a gradual building process to tame the unruly nature of the mind in order to adequately plumb the depths of your own psychological constructs.
But the benefits start accumulating right away. As you recalibrate your relationship with your internal world, your external world starts to recalibrate as well. A beautiful symbiosis of change occurs as the changes you are making within yourself starts to attract new energy and opportunities in your life.
Mindfulness is being at peace with what is. You may have to surf feelings of agitation, boredom, or aversion as you practice with love, ease and equanimity, but as your practice grows, insights into your own human nature will start to reveal themselves, and a healing process will unfold naturally.
At first, we need to let the mud settle and allow the water to clear through the discipline of concentration. Then, we can see into the true nature of things at much subtler level. These insights are gems of wisdom that while universal, are also profoundly personal.
Meditation in 3 easy steps
Meditation is a very simple practice that tends to get overcomplicated. Here, we break it down into three steps to allow it to feel accessible to anyone.
1) Take Your Seat
While it sounds easy enough, the first point is often the hardest. It’s common to come up with a laundry list of reasons not to sit:
“I don’t have enough time.”
“I have too many things to do.”
Have you considered that taking 5-20 minutes for yourself to meditate could make doing all those things a lot less stressful? Time is not fixed! When you carve out time for yourself, it’s common to get more things done with greater efficacy.
The Dalai Lama knew this when he said in a TV interview, “I usually meditate 1 hour a day, but on really busy days, I meditate 2 hours.”
POSTURE
It is important to sit upright either on the floor or a seat. Keep your spine long, especially the area behind the neck (do this by dropping your chin). If on a chair, your feet should be planted on the floor. A good way to start is with your hands turned down on your knees-- this encourages grounding and stillness.
I recently started meditating with my eyes open with a soft gaze toward the ground a few feet in front of me. It is also common to close your eyes. You can experiment with both, but I encourage eyes open unless it causes too much distraction.
2) Anchor Your Attention to Your Breath
Now that you took your seat, the next step is to anchor your attention to your breath. Without an anchor, your mind has nothing to focus on and will wander all over the place. Your breath is a powerful tool because it’s always constant and it comes from inside and outside of ourselves.
When I first started meditating, I couldn’t even feel my breath. This is common. You can direct your attention to the spot above your upper lip and beneath your nostril. Rest your mind there.
Notice whatever you can. You can notice temperature, perspiration, motion, static, or even just nothing. There is no wrong sensation.
With each exhale allow yourself to let go of whatever your mind wants to fixate on. Each time your mind wanders, come back to your breath, let it anchor you throughout your meditation.
Over time, you will access effortless states of concentration where it will feel unnatural to break your focus, but when starting out, always be gentle with yourself and remember, this is a gradual practice.
3.) Notice When the Mind Has Wandered
This step is really the action of the practice. Noticing when your mind has wandered is a powerful moment of presence. It is a moment of the very wakefulness we are cultivating on our cushion and in our lives. When you notice the mind has wandered, you are now in the driver seat.
It can be helpful to make a mental note when you notice yourself caught up in a stream of thoughts. You do this by noting to yourself, “thinking” each time you find your mind wandering and then come back to your anchor - the breath.
This is where you can start creating precision in your practice. Each time you notice the mind wandering and make a mental note of it, your awareness widens.
You may sit for 5 minutes and spend the whole five minutes coming back to the breath again and again. This is the practice. Be mindful not to berate yourself for getting lost in thoughts. This where gentleness works well with precision.
Stay precise and be gentle as you begin again on your next in-breath.
